Last year (I'm 28), I tried to read Enders Game for the for the first time since 15 years. I was disappointed, it's really cool, but for younger generations.
I hate to be that guy, but I thought that book was unreadable. Had some weird obsessive chip on the shoulder about Darwin (mentioned on almost every page). Complete with nearly contentless USA Today style infographics. I'd recommend "Sperm Wars" instead.
I've given Alan Watts The Book to at least five people I thought could use it. Four of them never mentioned it again. I'm marrying the fifth next month.
heh. I tried to get my friends into Jiddu Krishnamurthi but unfortunately people in the west seem to have a pavlovian revulsion to eastern 'guru's from the east nowadays.
There seems to be some sort of strange obsession with applying the scientific method to psychological issues. Bunch of my friends started meditating because it is 'scientifically proven' to make them happy, make them rich, make them have good sex or whatever . Nevermind that all those "studies" are pure nonsense[1]. But people will buy anything with the stamp of science on it, they are not joking when they claim 'I believe in science not god' .
Congratulations on your wedding and for finding a compatible partner. That's really great!!
I am glad to see somebody mentioning Jiddu Krishnamurti here.
He is the most underrated and forgotten person, mainly due to his own insistence, but he made a tremendous difference to some lives. I've come across his books almost twenty years ago, I haven't read any of his books in years now, but his teachings(insights he shared, because he wouldn't like to be called a teacher ) are so well ingrained that I am reminded of them every day.
Similar to the OP of this thread, I didn't marry a person who said he finds his teachings dry :), I am now happily married to my spouse for twelve years who humbly says it is too difficult to really understand Jiddu.
Fantastic book! I got my copy from my grandmother and have given away multiple copies since.
My favorite concepts from "The Book" are the Wiggles and the Net, exploring the idea that so many modern pressures and stresses are human created and are therefore open to change.
Yeah, right, I know, your comment was hilarious! I was adding joke to joke, but I guess I failed, someone else even downvoted my bad joke. Did my smiley make it feel snarky?
At its base, it's an exploration of how a conscious mind can arise from unconscious matter. For anyone who's attempted to read the thing and never quite gotten what Hofstadter's on about, the central theme is encapsulated in the dialogue ... Ant Fugue, with the emergence of the character Aunt Hillary from her component ants, who don't directly participate in "her" consciousness. Literally everything else is a long explanation -- from various angles -- of how, given sufficient complexity, the rules don't adequately describe the system, and the system need not be aware of the rules that give it rise. The mathematics, computer science, music, art and "spirituality" are all frames of reference for exploring and (to a limited extent) proving the central thesis: consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.
FWIW, I received this book as a gift. It's a fantastic book, but I probably wouldn't give it to someone studying or practicing programming or computer science today. For a high schooler with a budding interest, or for people who like to ponder math, science, philosophy and CS but haven't studied CS directly, it'd be a great gift. For a college or post college CS major, GEB spends so much of its time explaining topics that are now well known and well covered in class that the delight of discovery in the book is a bit lost and wasn't as exciting to read as it could have been if I'd read it earlier.
The book is pretty old, yes, and many of the topics are not uptodate any more (I just cannot believe how fast genetic research has developed in the last 20 years and the Internet was not even there when the book was written). But then - GEB never was a book for the classroom to teach computer science. The original intention, as confirmed by the author in the preface of a german anniversary edition of GEB in 2015, was to provide a graspable access to Gödels proof for a general audience. The project then escalated from an intended essay to the epic work it is.
I read it at the age of 19, multiple times, and for me it was the ultimate primer for everything: whatever you deal with, take it apart, change the context in which you are looking at it, look from the distance, look close and from all sides, extract patterns and apply them somewhere else, combine, prescind, generalize, play, be curious about each and everything and then - while reading the book, and on other occasions in life - enjoy brief moments of epiphany. And for this purpose - to open the mind for another perception of everything - GEB is timeless.
I gave it as a gift to a colleague at work, with whom I regularly ended up in funny, crazy scientific discourses. And I keep two shrink-wrapped copies from 1989 for each of my two kids - if I am gone and the kids ever want to know how I perceived the world, they just have to break the seal and read.
A nice book to pair with GEB is /From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic/. Certainly also better for someone who might find GEB a bit too idiosyncratic.
And, of course, if you want to simply read the proof, there's Nagel's /Gödel's Proof/.
Maverick, by Richardo Semler. I must have given away a dozen of this book to various people. Very inspiring if you are looking to build an organisation.
I've always loved the book, I recently gave it to a co-worker with somewhat Feynman-like qualities. He reciprocated with 'The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century', Salsburg.
It wasn't as highly rated as 'Cloud Atlas' but I particularly loved 'The Bone Clocks'. Something about his vision of a post-apocalyptic future seemed very plausible - and very memorable.
Yes that's a great book. I am still amazed how well it worked for me. I was a chain smoker smoking 40 cigs a day, and then I read the book and poof! I stopped for good.
I second this! I've recommended this to countless people. Did you guys find that a lot of people are really skeptical that a book can have such an impact? It certainly worked wonders for me as well.
I was skeptical at first too. But man, was I wrong! I have recommended it to about four or five friends so far. Only one read it till the end. And it didn't work so well on him, even though he reduced smoking. Did the book work on your friends who read it completely?
I have one other friend (the only one of them all to actually read) and it was just as effective for him as it was me. I'm now trying to get my sister to read it. The hard part seems to be getting people to pick it up and stick it through.
Not OP, but I stopped thanks to this book (the French translation) as well.
It does not try to make smokers feel guilty or use the usual rethoric of addict = weak. What really make it click for me was its deconstruction of the addiction mechanism. After reading the book, when I wanted a cigarette I knew exactly why, and I was convinced the feeling would fade quickly and subsequent occurrences would get milder as well.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] thread[0] http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/book
If asked, I would say those aren't the books I've found most amazing but they're the ones I felt compelled to give as gifts.
I hate to be that guy, but I thought that book was unreadable. Had some weird obsessive chip on the shoulder about Darwin (mentioned on almost every page). Complete with nearly contentless USA Today style infographics. I'd recommend "Sperm Wars" instead.
It's beautiful.
There seems to be some sort of strange obsession with applying the scientific method to psychological issues. Bunch of my friends started meditating because it is 'scientifically proven' to make them happy, make them rich, make them have good sex or whatever . Nevermind that all those "studies" are pure nonsense[1]. But people will buy anything with the stamp of science on it, they are not joking when they claim 'I believe in science not god' .
Congratulations on your wedding and for finding a compatible partner. That's really great!!
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19123875
Similar to the OP of this thread, I didn't marry a person who said he finds his teachings dry :), I am now happily married to my spouse for twelve years who humbly says it is too difficult to really understand Jiddu.
My favorite concepts from "The Book" are the Wiggles and the Net, exploring the idea that so many modern pressures and stresses are human created and are therefore open to change.
His live lectures, recorded in the 1960s, are great as well. Audible carries various collections: http://www.audible.com/search/ref=a_search_c4_1_16_1_srAuth?...
Neurolinguistic hacking! (it works, just ask Stephenson)(JOKE)
I read it at the age of 19, multiple times, and for me it was the ultimate primer for everything: whatever you deal with, take it apart, change the context in which you are looking at it, look from the distance, look close and from all sides, extract patterns and apply them somewhere else, combine, prescind, generalize, play, be curious about each and everything and then - while reading the book, and on other occasions in life - enjoy brief moments of epiphany. And for this purpose - to open the mind for another perception of everything - GEB is timeless.
I gave it as a gift to a colleague at work, with whom I regularly ended up in funny, crazy scientific discourses. And I keep two shrink-wrapped copies from 1989 for each of my two kids - if I am gone and the kids ever want to know how I perceived the world, they just have to break the seal and read.
And, of course, if you want to simply read the proof, there's Nagel's /Gödel's Proof/.
https://www.amazon.com/Crap-Taxidermy-Kat-Su/dp/1607748207/r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookin%27_with_Coolio
Stopped smoking six years ago and haven't had the desire to start again since. it feels great.
I actually played the nintendo DS adaptation of the book, which was also available on ios for a while.
it turned all the points the book was trying to make into a series of minigames that really illustrated the principles beautifully.
It does not try to make smokers feel guilty or use the usual rethoric of addict = weak. What really make it click for me was its deconstruction of the addiction mechanism. After reading the book, when I wanted a cigarette I knew exactly why, and I was convinced the feeling would fade quickly and subsequent occurrences would get milder as well.
HTH.